Monthly Archives: August 2013

by the Editors of The Nation, issue dated 9/16/13
There are both practical and humanitarian reasons to oppose US airstrikes in response to the horrific chemical weapons attack.

The images filtering out of the eastern suburbs of Damascus on August 21 were horrifying. Uploaded by residents using cellphones and video cameras to YouTube and other social media, they depict hundreds of Syrian civilians victimized by a chemical weapons rocket barrage, writhing in pain, foaming at the mouth and dying, with no visible wounds of the sort that would arise from conventional weapons. Doctors Without Borders has confirmed over 300 killed and said the symptoms “strongly indicate” that neurotoxic agents were used.

As we go to press, a swelling chorus of condemnation, led by the Western powers and including the Obama administration, has laid blame for the attack squarely on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The administration’s desire to uphold the international convention banning the use of chemical weapons is commendable, but so far there’s no independent verification of the Assad regime’s responsibility. Even so, Washington is reportedly preparing limited military action against Syrian government forces.

If the Assad regime is responsible for this attack—as certainly seems plausible—what could airstrikes be expected to accomplish? And why should the “humanitarian” response to this horrific event be military intervention? Although the American public is, with good reason, overwhelmingly opposed to military involvement in Syria’s chaotic civil war, much of the pundit and political classes have been calling for a US attack on Syrian military targets. Their rationale is not only that Assad must be punished for committing an atrocity but that US “credibility” is at stake—that, having declared the use of chemical weapons a “red line,” Obama will not be taken seriously if he doesn’t order military action. But any credibility Washington had in the region was lost long ago—if not in its war against Iraq based on false WMD allegations, then certainly in the chaos that resulted from the Libyan intervention. And Washington’s recent assent to the bloody coup in Egypt raises serious questions. Why does the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Cairo, and the killing of some 1,000 unarmed protesters, elicit little US response, while an attack killing perhaps the same number of civilians outside Damascus brings missile strikes?…

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.

The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.

But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals’ communications….

Fifty years ago today, I took the train to Washington,
D.C., with my then-husband Richard to participate in the most
important protest of our era. We were not part of a group, though
we knew many groups that were involved. We went on our own, as
citizens, who wanted to add our voices to others to demand a
society free of the racial barriers that denied equal rights to
Americans whose skin color was not white. We knew Bayard Rustin,
one of the organizers of the event, very well. Bayard is not well
known today, his picture seldom appears in history textbooks, yet
he was the great thinker and organizer behind the March on
Washington. He was a close friend of both Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and A. Philip Randolph, the legendary black labor leader. Bayard
has been unjustly neglected in history books because he was gay; he
was also a pacifist. He happened to be brilliant and a great
political strategist. Bayard was a strong believer in coalition
politics. He knew that blacks on their own would be unable to bring
about change, but blacks in alliance with organized labor had the
power to organize great events and make politicians take notice.
When we got to the Washington Monument, we found ourselves in a sea
of people of all races and all colors and all ages. …

Say what you will, the combative Harvard economist Larry Summers is a brilliant apostle of John Maynard Keynes and a strong advocate of using government spending to stimulate faltering economies and create jobs. He also understands – and has shown mathematically with Berkeley economist Brad deLong – why inflation does not become a threat in a severely depressed economy.

But, for all his smarts, Larry Summers has one major crime on his rap sheet. He helped orchestrate the Clinton-era deregulation that ended up fueling the crash of 2008, killing economies, jobs, growth, and hope across the globe. President Obama should not name him to head the Federal Reserve, which would only encourage him to kill again.

Like it or not, the Fed remains Washington’s most powerful regulator of the financial sector. As one of the most destructive deregulators of our time, Larry Summers is exactly the wrong fox to guard the henhouse. Close to Wall Street, for whose firms he sometimes works, Summers also profited personally from the deregulation, but he is far more dangerous than a hired killer. He believes in what he does.

This comes through clearly in an October 2009 Frontline documentary called “The Warning.” It is available online, as are the transcript and full-length interviews, from which I’ve taken most of what follows.

“The Warning” takes us back to the Bill Clinton boom of the late 1990s and tells of a very personal clash over how best to manage America’s rapidly expanding financial sector. Should we stick to the regulatory approach that had guided the American financial system with relative safety since the New Deal? Or should we let the “free market” – or to be more precise, Wall Street – regulate itself, even in the case of fraud?

Backing self-regulation stood Summers, who had become deputy secretary of the Treasury, along with two financial titans – his mentor and former head of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and the long-time Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, a disciple of the über-capitalist Ayn Rand and an ideologue with an almost mystical faith in free markets….

Equality Fraternity Reality

Strong children

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken ones" —Frederick Douglass

Ignorance and Power

“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” -- James Baldwin

Money is power….

"Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
— Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States 1877-1881

Let the people think….

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.”
-- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Taxes & budgets

Women's rights

Dehumanization

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human" - Aldous Huxley

Money is power

Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
-- Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States (1877-1881)

Riots

“Riots are the language of the unheard” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cost of War

Currently nearing $1.6 trillion, for Iraq and Afghanistan alone; watch it grow at Cost of War

The cause of war

"The cause of war is the preparation of war." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Presidential limits

"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

--Barack Obama, 2007

Totalitarianism

“To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

-- George Orwell

Reimagining capitalism

"Politicians argue over big government so they can avoid talking about big capitalism" -- William Greider in The Nation

The problem with democracy

Progressive calendar

Click hereto view calendar of progressive events in and near Chester County.Agenda view (click in upper right of calendar) may be best.

Links to other sites:

Let the people think …

"Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed."
--William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

On humor

"When oppressed peoples have no other remedy they resort to humor" --E. O. Wilson

Koch Brothers index

For a list of all posts relevant to the Koch Brothers on this site, click here.

Truth and consequences

"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out." -- Oscar Wilde

Power

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

-- Frederick Douglass, 1817-95

Schools, parents, democracy

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” -- John Dewey

Search

Liberty v. power

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
-- William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

On war

"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic." - A. J. P. Taylor

Bill Moyers says

"The opposite of poverty is not wealth; it is justice."

Ain’t they got no shame

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame

-- Nikki Giovanni

Need & Greed

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed" -- Gandhi

Normalcy?

"If this is normalcy, I'd hate to see what real trouble is" - the late Daniel Shore on Iraq, Morning Edition, NPR, 3/29/08

Freedom and tyranny

"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom,
those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." --Voltaire, 1764

Thoughts on War

"Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." -- George Orwell

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leon Trotsky

Total Cost of War

The cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to Pennsylvanians alone is over $57,000,000,000 and to the entire US is over $1.3 trillion; now wouldn't that be helpful in Harrisburg and DC these days? Track our dollars' alarming and destructive disappearance at CostofWar.com

The American oligarchy

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not